Think for Yourself Quotes

“I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.”

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.”

“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

“Have the courage to use your own reason.”

“Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.”

“Free thinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs.”

“Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too.”

“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within.”

“People tell you the world looks a certain way. Parents tell you how to think. Schools tell you how to think. TV. Religion. And then at a certain point, if you’re lucky, you realize you can make up your own mind. Nobody sets the rules but you. You can design your own life.”

“There can be no real greatness without original thought.”

“You will never know what you are capable of unless you think for yourself.”

“Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.”

“To find yourself, think for yourself.”

“What is is more important than what should be. Too many people are looking at what is from a position of thinking what should be.”

“If you learn only methods, you’ll be tied to your methods, but if you learn principles you can devise your own methods.”

“Sapere aude. Dare to think.”

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

“Understand that the right to choose your own path is a sacred privilege. Use it. Dwell in possibility.”

“Trust yourself. Think for yourself. Act for yourself. Speak for yourself. Be yourself. Imitation is suicide.”

“The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.”

“If you don’t control your mind, someone else will.”

“The ancestor of every action is thought.”

“Thinking is the hardest work in the world for those who have not formed the habit, but thinking can give pleasure and excitement.”

“Learn to see things as they really are, not as we imagine they are.”

“The reality of life is that your perceptions - right or wrong - influence everything else you do…”

“To think accurately you must separate facts from mere information, and then important facts from the unimportant.”

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

“The mind that opens to a new idea never returns to its original size.”

“The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

“Thinking is the hardest work in the world, which is probably why so few engage in it.”

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

“Read less. Think more.”

“We are powerfully imprisoned by the terms in which we have been conducted to think.”

“No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.”

“Geniuses think productively, not reproductively. When confronted with a problem, they ask how many different ways can I look at it, how can I rethink the way I see it, and how many different ways can I solve it, instead of what have I been taught by someone else on how to solve this.”

“Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.”

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”

“The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy.”

“Don’t dismiss a good idea simply because you don’t like the source.”

“When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.”

“Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.”

“If the reason for doing something is that everyone else is doing it, it’s not a good enough reason.”

“If principles can become dated, they’re not principles.”

“Remember that what’s right isn’t always popular, and what’s popular isn’t always right.”

“If a person will devote their time to securing facts in an impartial, objective way, their worries will usually evaporate in the light of knowledge”

“Almost all the progress ever made in human thought has been made by the Doubting Thomas’s, the questioners, the challengers, the show-me crowd.”

“Science is simply the truth about anything.”

“Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case, it is usually at the expense of others. In other words, it is the opposite of idealism.”

“Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.”